A Veteran Psychiatrist/Parent/Writer Observes the American Culture

Month: April 2016

It has been months since the former longest-serving Speaker of House, Dennis Hastert, was outed as a child molester of the youth he coached in his school teaching years. He was convicted of paying out millions, reportedly somewhere in excess of over $3M to at least one former victim to ensure his silence on Mr. Hastert’s sexual predatory crimes. It all came out in a mundane investigative manner, following the money as the saying goes, when large withdrawals over a period of time were from his bank accounts were being made and drew that attention of the local banker, banker investgators and all the way up the chain of oversight exacntly the way it was supposed to work.

Now the story has broken in the news media ari waves and picked up nationally that investigators are apparently dropping the other shoe. They are releasing/leaking to the press that he molested not just the one person he was paying off for silence but a now known total of at least four young vulnerable high school male youth under his tutelage. Whether this is a public service of the “feds” to reveal and answer the questions hanging in the air over this shocking revelation and investigation leading to a federal conviction of one of our fairly respected national Congressional medical campaign leading o another round of indictments,remains to be seen. But it does confirm the suspicion and clinical suppositions of many mental health clinicians who have worked with sexual predators and molesters, aalnost none of them ever molest just one child or youth. It is almost universally that case that these predators finally are outed after a career of molesting multiple children and youth; after all, this is a puzzling condition that combines elements of addiction, brain dysfunction that is likely lifelong and yet poorly understood, based in a thoroughly dishonest ‘personality disorder,” people who tend not to be treatable or achieve throughgoing lasting internalized change. They require treatment which is more like North Korean “re-education,” teaching them how to manage and control every second of their lives their malicious impulses toward children and youth for their own gratification. There are many mental health professionals who work in correctional settings to try to change or instill control in such antisocial predators, but in my judgment they can only prepare these men for a life outside a correctional facility that is backed up by stainless steel structure that intrudes on their privacy and all elements of their personal lives to a degree that our society has not yet been prepared to go. Very few of these predators can control or give up their urges to molest

It remains to be seen what the recent revelations by the ‘feds’ means for Mr. Hastert, his declaration with tears that the “shame” of being outed and convicted of elements of his scheme to cover up his earlier career as a molester was “punishment enough,” makes one consider the possibility that the “feds” are going to reveal in the near future far worse issues, e.g., a continuation of his care as a child molester or worse long after he left coaching in high school decades ago.